Terror at the Fair (A Snap Malek Mystery) Read online

  "I haven't got the foggiest idea, Dave," I told him. "As your loud-mouthed, sawed-off crony here from the Sun-Times said, I'm just a feature writer now. Why bother asking me anything?" They'd gotten enough information from me for one day. Let them burn up some shoe leather.

  "You wouldn't be jiving us now, would you?" Stapleton's eyes narrowed. "Once a police reporter, always a police reporter, I say."

  "That so? Well, I'll think about those words while I'm interviewing one of the long-legged lassies who water ski at the Cypress Gardens Water Show out in the lake. But then, such fluff wouldn't interest either of you hard-bitten, tough-guy crime chasers. Gotta run, boys."

  In fact, I did interview one of the nubile blonde lovelies in the water show, a copy of the original version in Florida underwritten by one of the railroads transporting Chicagoans south to the warm weather come wintertime. Sure enough, none other than Phil Muller showed up to take the photos, and he took plenty of them–far more than necessary.

  As for the young lady, one Melissa Sue Harkness, age nineteen, of Dothan, Alabama, she didn't have a lot to say, other than her being "honored to be chosen for this wonderful opportunity to present our show to the wonderful people of Chicago and all the other visitors to the fair," a phrase she used three times in a voice that could melt ice cubes while still in the refrigerator.

  I dutifully filed a few paragraphs, knowing full well my words would play second-fiddle to one of Muller's cheesecake shots, which the picture editor, himself a lover of the feminine form, probably would spread across at least three columns.

  That chore completed, I wandered through the crowded fairgrounds, looking for feature material. So far, I had got a few story suggestions from the paper, but I'd done each of them–including the water-skiing belle–and no further inspiration came forth from the Tower, although Metzger had proved to be a decent source of ideas.

  My wristwatch told me it was just about time to knock off for the day, so I vowed to come in fresh in the morning, filled with ideas. As it would turn out, a story would present itself, but not the kind of story I expected.

  Chapter Eleven

  The time has come yet again, Papa. This will be different from the last one, and I will do my best to make sure very little pain is felt. I have not become an avenger simply to inflict hurt, but to carry out the necessary work quickly and efficiently. The real pain, mental rather than physical, will be keenly felt by those in charge here, the ones who care only about themselves, their precious companies, and their pocketbooks–not about the many who toil with loyalty and diligence so their leaders can enjoy the spoils.

  I think of you every day of my life, Papa, and I will continue to until the very last, when I lie down to die…

  Chapter Twelve

  Figuring I needed time to noodle on story ideas, I got to the fair earlier than usual the next morning–8:20 by my dependable Elgin watch. I had just settled in at the desk when an excited Rob Taylor, Metzger's summer intern, dashed into the PR man's office, panting.

  Metzger quickly closed his door, but through the plywood wall I could catch snatches of the young man's excited conversation: "…on the ground…first thing this morning…just lying there…awful, awful!"

  I'd heard enough and barged into the little office. "What's going on?"

  Metzger got flustered and swallowed hard, looking at his intern. "Rob here says he was over at the…the New Orleans French Quarter, and there's–"

  "There's a body on the ground there, and, and…" Rob sputtered, waving his arms.

  "Let's go right now!"

  "Wait," Metzger said. "We need to–"

  "You can come or not, but I'm on my way," I shouted over my shoulder. The New Orleans exhibit was only a few hundred yards away, and after a three-minute trot, I found myself in the square that had been made to look like a slice of the Louisiana city's French Quarter.

  A cluster of people had gathered at a decorative fountain in the center of the plaza. I elbowed my way through the small crowd and spotted the object of their attention.

  On the pavement next to the ornate fountain lay a thin, gray-haired man in a red shirt and long white waiter's apron. His tongue protruded and his sightless eyes stared skyward. His slack mouth was open. The cause of death seemed apparent: a knotted loop of twine embedded in his thin neck. I had seen enough corpses over the years to know the guy had been dead for hours.

  "Who is this?" I barked above the sobbing of a hefty woman in braided hair and an apron who knelt beside the body.

  "George Burnwell," said an ashen-faced old fellow beside me who looked like he might keel over any second. "Like me, he is–was–a waiter at the Café St. Louis." He tilted his head toward an archway leading, I knew, to a train dining car adjoining the street scene as part of the Illinois Central Railroad's elaborate exhibit.

  "Has anybody called the police?" I looked around at the grim faces.

  "We all just got here to open up for the day," said a woman in a ruffled blouse and a red hoop skirt. "When we came in, we found…" She sniffled and gestured toward the body.

  At that moment, one of Chicago's Finest barreled into the courtyard, out of breath and followed by an equally puffing Fred Metzger. The law came in the form of the very same uniformed cop, O'Brien, who had arrived on the scene shortly after the stagecoach shooting.

  "All right, all right, don't anybody leave here," he ordered. "There's detectives on the way who'll want to talk to all of you. Who found him?"

  "Actually, several of us did, sir," the hoop-skirted woman volunteered. "We all arrived at just about the same time."

  "Now ain't this just convenient, though," he snarled, hands on hips.

  "But, don't you see, it's the same each day," she insisted. "We are told to be here at 8:30, which gives us an hour to get everything set up, what with the gates opening at 9:30 and all."

  "Well, he musta got here first today," Officer O'Brien said, shaking his head and looking down at the body.

  "More likely, he never left last night," pronounced the old waiter next to me, who had somewhat composed himself. "George, he was in charge of the dining car, like in the old days on the I.C. when we both worked as stewards running those grand diners on the Panama Limited and the City of New Orleans. In a restaurant, you would have called us maitre d's. Every night here, he stayed around to tidy up after the rest of us went home. He was a real perfectionist. Everything had to be just so."

  "Well, then he must have–" O'Brien halted in mid-sentence as two square-jawed, grim-faced plainclothes dicks in fedoras strode up. I was pleased to note neither of them was Jack Prentiss.

  The senior man of the pair, who identified himself as Corcoran, swiftly took over. "I'm going to want to talk to everybody here, one by one. Someplace private we can go?"

  "Detective, I'm Fred Metzger, in charge of public relations at the fair. My office is close by, or if you prefer, we can use the dining car, which is part of this exhibit. I'm sure the Illinois Central folks won't mind."

  "But, we're opening to the public in a little while to serve brunch," a tall, dark-haired fellow in a business suit said plaintively.

  "The diner sounds fine to me. You'll just have to open up later than usual today," Corcoran replied crisply. "Murder trumps everything else."

  Having effectively silenced any objections, the detective and his partner led the gathering through an archway between the quaint stuccoed buildings and toward the dining car. I turned in the opposite direction, heading for the pressroom and a telephone.

  "Hey you, where you going?" barked Corcoran's sidekick, whom I later learned was named Baxter.

  "I'm a Tribune reporter. Hafta file a story. I'll check in with you later."

  "Get back here," he bellowed, but I had already left New Orleans.

  "What in God's name is going on at your damned fair, Malek?" Hal Murray on the city desk demanded in his usual machine-gun cadence after I had given him a quick rundown from my desk in the empty pressroom.

  "Like
Chief Fahey has been saying for years, trouble just follows me. I'll give rewrite a few graphs for the two-star, then I've got to get back and see how the cops are doing." I proceeded to dictate the bare essentials, including the dead man's name. Seconds after I'd hung up, the phone rang. It was Fahey.

  "I just got word about this latest–" He uttered one of those words the Tribune will not print. "Fill me in."

  "Isn't that what you have a whole regiment of men for? To fill you in?"

  "Yeah, but I like to hear what you think, too."

  "I'm honored, Fergus, I really am. I haven't got a lot for you, I'm afraid, but I did get to the scene a little ahead of the uniformed man and your guys."

  "Why am I not surprised?"

  "Anyway, as we speak, Detective Corcoran is interviewing people over at the Illinois Central exhibit, where it happened, along with his sidekick."

  "That would be Baxter."

  "Okay. I've never met either of them. Anyway, it seems the victim, old fellow, name of Burnwell, got garroted sometime last night, probably as he was closing up. You probably already know that much."

  "Sort of, yeah. Give me your take."

  "Eh…I don't have one. The guy was a retired railroad employee. Used to work in the dining cars, for what it's worth." Fahey spat a Tribune no-no word again.

  "Yeah, it's one hell of a mess, all right," I sympathized. "I'd better get back there. Baxter got sore when I broke from the group gathered around the body to call the paper. Before I go, anything new to tell me about the earlier mishap?"

  A snarl came over the wire. "Things are run in a pretty casual way out there along the lake," Fahey said, "and the employees, such as they are, seem to drift in and out like day laborers. Three men loaded blanks into the rifles at the pageant every day, and one of them didn't bother showing up again after the shooting. He had filled out an employment card when they hired him, but the address he put down on North Clarendon doesn't exist. For that matter, he probably doesn't exist either, at least under the name he put down."

  "Which was?"

  "White, Samuel White. To top if off, the Social Security number he put down also is a phony. I already gave all this to your replacement, of course, and presumably, he passed it along to those other leeches up in the pressroom."

  "Did the guys who White worked with give you a description of him?"

  "Yeah, I also fed it to your replacement."

  "How 'bout feeding it to me, too? After all, I'm still on the Trib payroll."

  Fahey made a production of growling.

  "Come on, Fergus, humor an old friend."

  "Seems I've been humoring you for years now. I've come to feel like it's part of my job description. Okay, according to his fellow rifle-loaders, he was pretty ordinary. Somewhere in his mid-forties, about five-ten, brown hair, mustache, mole on his right cheek. He talked with what was described as some sort of a slight foreign accent, although they weren't sure what–possibly German or Swedish."

  "Anything else?"

  "That's it. Now you know what we know about him."

  "All right, thanks. I'll be talking to you, Fergus."

  "That's what I'm afraid of. Each time we speak, I get a new headache."

  "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning," I told him, hanging up before he could mount a retort.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I returned to the Illinois Central exhibit, I found several people clustered around the door to the dining car. Officer O'Brien stood just outside their little circle, making sure nobody drifted away as I had earlier.

  "Hey, you were here before, right after they found Burnwell," said a little guy with a mustache and a flat cap. "That one cop wearing a suit got doggone mad when you left."

  "Well, I'm back now. I'm a Tribune reporter, and I needed to phone my office."

  "About this?"

  "Yeah. What's going on inside?" I gestured toward the dining car.

  "They're interviewing all of us, one at a time," said the woman in the hoop skirt. "I don't know of anything we can tell them that will help."

  "They have to go through the motions, though," I told her. "Did any of you know Mr. Burnwell very well?"

  The old fellow, whose first name was Orrin, spoke up. "Like I said before, George and I used to be in charge of dining cars on this line before we retired. He was always a hard worker and took his job very seriously."

  "Did George make any enemies along the way?"

  Orrin lifted his shoulders and let them drop. "Not that I know of. Oh, I suppose some of the dining car staff might have got upset with him from time to time. He was a taskmaster, but then, so was I," he added proudly. "And I don't think I ever made what you could call enemies."

  "Anybody else here have something to add about him?" I looked around the somber little group. They all shook their heads.

  "I really didn't know him well," a small woman put in, "but he seemed very nice. I'm a waitress in the diner, and he was always gentlemanly, both to the staff and the customers. There aren't enough men around like him anymore." She began sniffling and pulled a lacy handkerchief out of a lacy sleeve, dabbing at her face.

  "Was George always the last one to leave here at night?"

  "Oh yes, yes sir," Orrin said, nodding. "He had been a widower for years, didn't have anybody to go home to, and he said being here beat sitting around in an empty apartment."

  "Where did he live?"

  "Out south, around Seventy-first and Jeffrey Boulevard. He laughed about how he'd worked for the Illinois Central for forty years, and now he was commuting up here to the fair on the same darn railroad. He just couldn't get away from the ol' I.C., he liked to joke."

  "Uh-huh. Did he work at the fair last year, too?"

  "Yessir, and so did I. We had a lot of fun serving in the diner. It seemed like the old days, when we was still working, and we even got a little bit of money for it, too." Orrin looked down at his polished shoes and shook his head.

  "Did he have any children?"

  "None I'm aware of, no sir. He was all alone in the world."

  Just then, Detective Baxter opened the door of the diner and eyed our gathering at the bottom of the steps. "Okay, who's next? Anyone?"

  Nobody seemed anxious to get grilled, so I volunteered, climbing into the brown-orange-and-yellow streamlined railway car.

  "You," Baxter spat. "The reporter, right?"

  "Guilty as charged," I said with a grin. "You wanted me back here, so I'm back."

  He made a face and led me into the dining car, with its white linens and silver and a rose in a slim vase at every table, all ready for customers. At a table for four in the middle of the car sat Detective Charles Corcoran, shuffling through papers, presumably notes he had taken.

  He looked up at me without enthusiasm. "Tribune man, huh?"

  I nodded, sliding into a chair across from him. A stony Baxter remained standing, arms folded across his chest.

  "I'll be honest, Mr…?"

  "Malek."

  "I'll be honest, Mr. Malek; I have never been a big fan of newspapermen."

  "Sorry to hear it."

  "I doubt it. Anyway, it's neither here nor there at the moment. Tell me, how did you happen to be at the scene–and so quickly?"

  I filled him in on my ongoing assignment at the fair and my learning of what had just occurred at the New Orleans exhibit.

  Corcoran still wore the dubious expression. "So you must have been around when the guy got plugged at the pageant, huh?"

  "Yes, I happened to be in the audience."

  "I read the report on that business," the detective said. "I seem to recall Detective Prentiss mentioned your name in it."

  "That so?"

  "Yeah. Somehow, I got the impression he wasn't happy to see you on the scene."

  I leaned back and fired up a Lucky Strike. "I couldn't say. Maybe like you, he doesn't care for newspaper reporters."

  Corcoran wrinkled his brow. "Didn't you used to work at Eleventh and State?"
/>   "That's right."

  "Does that mean you're in thick with Chief Fahey?"

  "I know him, which isn't surprising after all these years. I'm hardly in thick with him, though," I said, brushing the question away with a hand.

  The cop exhaled and looked at his notebook. "All right, as a reporter, you're supposed to be observant. Give me your impression of the scene when you arrived this morning."

  "I must have gotten there five–maybe ten–minutes after the first ones on the job had found the body. I'm no expert, but it's obvious Burnwell had been dead for hours. He was awful to look at."

  "All stiffs are. Did any of the people standing around act funny?"

  "Most of them seemed pretty shaken. Sounded like they all liked the guy."

  "That's all?"

  "Yes, why? Have any of the people you talked to acted suspicious?"

  "I'm the one asking the questions here," Corcoran shot back as if starring in a grade-B crime film.

  "Fine by me," I said offhandedly. I already was on the shit list of one detective, Prentiss. No sense alienating a second.

  "Okay, Malek, you can go," Corcoran said curtly, glaring at me.

  I rose and walked down the aisle of the dining car toward the door. My back was turned to Baxter, but I would have laid odds he glared, too.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was over so quickly, Papa–in just seconds, so it seemed. I am sure he felt almost no pain, and he did not struggle to speak of. He was old, and would have died soon, anyway. I admit to feeling nervous at first, never having killed with my own hands before. But then, just before it happened, I became very calm. My hands are still shaking a little now, although I know that soon will pass. However the panic here on the fairgrounds will not pass, but rather grow, as I continue to seek a peace for you that never came when you were alive.

  Now I shall begin to plan my next action. If all goes well, I believe it will occur in, of all places, a tunnel–and not a tunnel of love. Oh, I know I should not joke about such things. There is nothing whatever here to laugh about. Believe me, Papa, I am as serious as I have ever been in my life…